WOW. That’s interesting. Kinda brilliant if it works. Wouldn’t work in the US, unfortunately.
It’s the same thing Brazil did.
He’s rich enough that he’s kind of a parent corporation by himself, so:
X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the “provider” of X, which could be defined to include other Musk-led firms.
But yeah, American law has been limited so the buck stops at the company which declares bankruptcy and the money starts a new company.
Not everyone else system is as shitty
so important to realize this. laws are just what this group of people said. another group of people say they’re this. in the end, what they do is all that matters. it’s almost like you could just skip them, grab him by the collar, and shake him down to the tune of ‘whatever it takes to make you sit down, shut up, and stop your BS’.
fine the fucker for 20% of his net “worth”, that should give him some pause
Not really billions is beyond being halved
(Was drinking when I wrote this, was saying billions is a so much money it’s difficult to conceptualize, seems like folks understood for the most part, but someone said musks money is in stocks etc which is a factor, anyways be well)
Hi I’m a mathematician.
What the actual fuck are you talking about?
I think they’re just saying that if you’re a multi billionaire and get a 50% net worth fine, you’re still a billionaire once it’s done.
I’m a mathematician too. They’re probably speaking from an intuitive grasp of utility.
While I disagree that “billions is beyond being halved”, there is some truth to the idea that numbers can get so big that halving doesn’t make much difference. That seems very very counter-intuitive, so I’ll try to briefly explain.
Consider (10^10 + 2). That’s 10000000000+2. I think it’s fair to say that the +2 doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s still approximately 10^10.
So then, consider 10^(10^10)×100. That’s a huge number, too big to type here, then multiplied by 100. So the result is 100 times bigger than the huge number. But… writing it down we see this:
10^(10^10)×100 = 10^(10^10+2) ≈ 10^(10^10).
So although ×100 does make it one hundred times bigger… that just doesn’t really make a lot of difference to a number as big as that one. As numbers get bigger and bigger, they start to take on properties a bit like ‘infinity’. Addition stops being important, then multiplication, then for even bigger numbers exponentiation doesn’t huge much of an impact either.
Mathematically, I think this is really cool and interesting. But I don’t think 1 billion is that big. 10^9 is big enough that +2 doesn’t matter much, but not so big that ×2 doesn’t matter.
[edit] (I’m struggling to get the nested powers to look right… So hopefully my meaning is clear enough anyway.)
A single billion, when put in terms of money, is enough that - simply invested in GICs and bonds, earning a very, very conservative 1% interest - it would earn you ten million dollars a year in interest alone.
I would challenge you to even come up with a reasonable way to spend ten million dollars a year. By my back of the napkin math you could vacation every single day, living in hotels and eating at fancy restaurants, and still not make a dent in that.
Musk has an estimated net worth of $247 billion. You could fine him 99% of his current wealth, and he would still struggle to spend enough that he wouldn’t end up increasing his remaining wealth every year.
And this is why it is ludicrous to believe that ultra-rich people earn their fortune with hard work or good ideas. Being rich generates its own money. Being poor is expensive. There should be no billionaires, for any reason. Such concentrated wealth is very bad.
I would challenge you to even come up with a reasonable way to spend ten million dollars a year.
I would fund multiple forms of art media and have them released for free every year while living on ramen in my leaky apartment
Hello to any billionaires looking for a worthy heir
Now imagine a world where, instead of there being billionaires, everyone had their basic needs met, so artists could afford to focus on creating their art instead of relying on handouts from a capricious god.
But I want to be a capricious god
now I like you, you see the good combinations immediately
Interesting concept, thank you!
Have you ever played idle champions of the forgotten realms? At some point you start to get this feeling.
Happens in MMOs too, world of Warcraft was bad with it over the years on and off.
They’ve reduced the numbers down multiple times so that people start to feel progression again.
I’m not too familiar with WoW, but I think it’s a bit different.
In the idle clicker, you quickly get to exponential numbers, so when you’re optimizing the party and you have a choice of say, something that doubles your base damage or something, it really feels irrelevant because after all the other multipliers your hero is already dealing 2x10^(102), and going to 4x10^(102) is nothing
Yeah I think that can happen at different scales, and of course MMOs didnt just increase the numbers higher and higher, they added more damage sources per second, per target.
It gets to the point you need a meter and graph to really tell much of a difference with anything, but you won’t be able to create enough data points to make a real determinstion.
So the end result I think is the same you are describing. You get a new upgrade and it looks like it will be a substantial difference but you end up not being able to tell.
The game you are talking about, is the exponential increase a feature of the game? It sounds like it goes up very quick from what you described.
Maybe posting a picture where you write it out? I think I understand though.
I think I read it like you did first, that fining him billions would be more than half of his net worth, which is wrong.
But I think they mean that if you have billions, taking away half wouldnt change your life. I’d also say thats wrong for musk though because his money is tied up in companies. If he had to pay a cash fine of a huge amount, that likely would cause discomfort.
division has no power here old man!
They’re not talking about Maths. They’re talking about wealth.
Do it. The crimes are almost entirely by him personally, and had unprecedented damage. He should be responsible with all his money - a Twitter-sized blow would be a slap on the wrist as the platform is worth just $5B or thereabouts.
Less considering more doing
How about making them such a high percentage that it would genuinely impact their bottom line and not a measly amount calculated as “cost of doing business”
4% of gross revenue is not a negligible amount. For no company.
Probably, but it would depend on how much gross revenue they make on said practice, and how often they get a fine.
Start at 100% and work down from there?
That would be extra funny, considering at least some motivation behind his initially bidding on Twitter, was to cash out his absurdly overvalued Tesla stock, without causing it to crash.
Clearly he signed that initial Delaware contract while he was still riding high on mania, but still, his desire to convert his overpriced Tesla stock played no small part. The remaining rationale was mostly drug-induced psychosis, but I digress.
So, calculating fines based on his overpriced assets, forcing him to sell off a bunch of those shitty assets, and risking their price falling closer to their true worth, would be hilarious.
It’s also why I am skeptical that they’ll do it, or at least I’m skeptical they’ll do it in a way that would trigger a domino effect, or market contagion.
It’s finally time to hold the people hiding behind the companies accountable!!
woohoo!
break his ability to finance the orange felon
I mean he is leveraging his Tesla stock
For twitter, he actually isn’t. That was the original plan, but he moved away from it and got additional external financing, and then put up more cash himself by selling additional Tesla stock.
Not sure about boring company / neuralink.
DO IT!
Do it if you’re bad
and this is why we dont fuck with the chinese wall
As much as I hate musk, I don’t think this is correct, or even legal…?
He’s free to leave the EU at anytime. They are allowed to create appropriate punishments to deter further misuse. They are saying here that they need to be able to punish more to deter him, as he’s an asshole who says fuck you to everyone.
legality i don’t know, but guess who has an infinite supply of lawyers? Musk was able to secure loans for his Twitter misadventure based on all his other shit. Everything he does is entangled with his other stuff. The Hyperloop? lies.
he’s the one whose blurred the lines between the businesses.
taking funds from one to pay for the other regularly.
I’d say the EU has every right to do it this way.
Corporations do this regularly. Using funds from one branch of their business to prop up others. That’s neither new or illegal in the EU.
you’re right, it’s not. but when legally attempting to distinguish where one company ends and the other begins, it’s up to the court to judge based on liquidity between the two.
if you run company A B and C and have money flowing from A to C and C to B and B to A, the feds might think you’re laundering money.
While I have no idea about legality, it is quite obvious that X/Twitter is not really run as a company run as a public communications platform, but rather as a fever dream of Musk.
Especially the Eli Lily Co. disaster should’ve been a wake up call for X of how much harm the fake checkmarks can bring, yet nothing was done. Most likely because Elon Musk didn’t care. He basically runs it like it’s how little service that he fully owns and controls with full disregard to anything but his own vision.
Therefore including his other businesses makes sense, as the fine that is only based on X’s income would probably be negligible in his opinion, as he runs it on a loss anyways. Only bigger fines would actually have any effect in my opinion.
I still can’t believe nothing substantive came of that.
It was incredibly harmful to the reputation and stock value of multiple pharmaceutical companies as well as Twitter. And then the greedy pharma assholes had to publicly announce they were still price-gauging people for life-sustaining medicine, making the reputational damage even worse.
That very much reads like “the ends justifies the means” logic. If a fine isn’t likely to change behavior, they should just block the platform.
Wven better, do like brazil; block and fine
Who cares about legal if it hurts republicans?
Is the EU just going to bet that none of its companies ever have to do business outside of the EU?
Eh?
Because retaliation on behalf of domestic businesses is something Europe freaking invented.
Why would they think that?
